Butterfield Institute - 01 - The Halo Effect (16 page)

I do not come often with my clients. It is my job to have sex. Not my desire. Just like an actress does not fall in love with every leading man she plays opposite.

But sometimes she does. And tonight in the theater, this fantasy is too sweet. And Peter Pan’s fingers are too expert.

He strokes harder, then softer; he kisses me in rhythm to the tension he is building. I almost forget. But I can’t. This is not my game.

I reach out. Oh, so slowly, scared, unknowing. I touch his knee, I hear him sigh. Encouragement. His fingers stop moving. Desperately I want to get them moving again. But this isn’t my game. I move my fingers up his thigh and find the bulge in his pants.

Still sixteen, I stop, react, then try again. My fingertips run up and down the length of his erection. Testing it. Learning it.

“Is this what you want?” I whisper.

“More, Jenny, more.” He is using her name; he has paid for the right to do that. I don’t mind. I am enjoying
being Jenny, who is the teenager he was in love with thirty-one years before.

I get braver and unzip his fly and fumble in his pants to release him. I stroke him with my hand and he moves in his seat, thrusting out. And rather than this be the end, his fingers begin to circulate deep within me again. He mimics my movements so we are doing the same thing to each other now. My hand slides down and up, his fingers probe. We are in tandem.

Faster. He pushes forward. So do I. Faster yet. He pushes his lips at me, presses hard, I can feel his teeth and his fingers in me and my fingers on him and the sounds of a guitar in the background and the feel of mohair velvet on the back of my thighs and my breasts loose under my shirt.

The first wave hits me with a shock. It is very rare that this happens. But I don’t fight it. I give him the benefit of the feeling, I let him hear the pleasure, and it is what he needs to take him over the edge. The fortyseven-year-old man, who has never quite stopped wanting Jenny, whoever she was, throws his head back and lets me milk him to orgasm.

Not bad for a three-thousand-dollar-night’s work.

I’m sorry.

I know you don’t want to believe it. I know it hurts. You want to be his Jenny. You are his wife and his friend and the mother of his children. But you just can’t be her. At least not in real life. That’s for the movies and the make-believe. And that is what I’m in the biz of doing. Making make-believe real—for a few hours, at least.

L
ater, looking back on it with a level head, it would be hard to explain my decision. But at the time, it seemed inevitable.

Mitch came to pick up Dulcie that Saturday so she could, as per our custody agreement, spend the next ten days with him. The fact that Dulcie was out of the house and safely ensconced with her father left me untethered. As used to her being at Mitch’s as I was, I still didn’t sleep well when she was gone. I lived in a doorman-guarded building, but still I worried. Not that my twelve-year-old daughter kept me safe, but I felt secure when I knew where she was and could be certain she was fine.

So it was with this uneasy edge that I spent the weekend obsessing about a man who had so far killed two prostitutes and the fact that one of my patients, who was also a prostitute, was missing.

I rationalized my decision because there obviously was a chance that Cleo was missing because of that same man. Or
that one of the men whom she had written about in the book had her.

Either way, chances were she was in danger.

And there weren’t many people who could help her.

I spent most of Saturday in a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt sitting in my living room with my copy of Cleo’s manuscript, the pages Elias had given me of the same manuscript with his notes in the margins, and a pad of yellow paper, making my own lists and notes.

From early in the morning to late that night, while the sun traveled in its westward arc, I pored over her pages, no longer reading for the overall meaning. I was mining the book. I made a detailed list of the men she referred to, and underneath each name that she’d given him I wrote any and all identifying information. The type of job he held, where he lived, whom he had introduced her to, what other clients he had brought into the fold, the kind of tips he gave, if any, and of course, what his sexual proclivity was.

In all, she mentioned more than twenty men. Fifteen in detail. And in enough detail in every case but one for me to figure out, along with the help of the Internet and a few phone calls to friends who knew people who knew people, who they probably were in real life and what their actual names were.

Cleo had a method to her rechristening of these men: they were either named for what they liked or for what they did. For instance, Lindbergh was a politician who was also an amateur pilot; Lord Byron was a bestselling author; the Marquis was an actor who had played the role of the Marquis de Sade in an Academy Award–winning film; Perry Mason was a public defender who had won a well-televised case and had gone on to become a TV commentator; Superman was a highranking and very charismatic ex-D.A. who was an NYC politician; and on and on. Each page of the manuscript would be
cause for a lawsuit unless she did a much better job of disguising the men.

Surprising perhaps to someone who did not study human sexuality for a living, it would seem that most of what these men wanted was tame. Boring, even. It was the newness, the lack of commitment, the nonrelationship, nonresponsibility of the act, the desire for someone young and beautiful, the need for someone discreet who could be trusted, the lack of interest in the woman herself, the ego and the narcissistic needs of these men that sent them to Cleo or her girls time after time.

These were not the men who went with the street whores I worked with in prison. So, maybe, there
was
no connection between the Magdalene murders and Cleo. Maybe she had taken herself out of circulation for some other reason and just hadn’t even wanted to tell the two men she was closest to. Her business partner and her fiancé.

But I didn’t think so.

I worked on the lists and reread sections of the book for the whole day. Then I checked my list against Elias’s. We had both identified the same four men as those with the most to lose. But I had put a fifth man on my list that he hadn’t. I went on to make another list of second choices.

By the time I stopped to make dinner, my instincts were telling me that one of the men in this book, knowing that she had made a deal with a publisher, had taken matters into his own hands.

In the bowl, the tuna looked pathetic. I hadn’t remembered to dice the celery small enough and I used too much mayo and then too much pepper. I was embarrassed. The simplest meal. The most meager dinner. And I screwed it up.

I dumped the mess on some rye bread I had found in the refrigerator, added pickle slices and brought the sandwich
over to the table. I nibbled on it and sipped a glass of cold white wine and read my notes over again.

So many men had motives that it became less and less likely that there was any connection with the serial killer. It had to be one of these wealthy men who couldn’t stand the thought that his carefully constructed lie was going to be revealed.

The bread got soggy way too fast. What had I done wrong? Damn. It was the water. I’d forgotten to drain the water.

I threw it out. Opened a second can. Drained the water. Then grabbed the bread. But all that was left in the plastic bag was the heel. Great. Out of bread. There was, however, a bag of prewashed lettuce. So I put that in a clean bowl, added the tuna and tossed it up with my fork.

It was dry. I found some dressing in the fridge, shook it and drizzled that on the salad. Better but by no means good.

I had another salad in my mind. One I had seen in
Gourmet
magazine, a Niçoise salad served poolside at a five-star hotel in the south of France. With tiny black olives glistening in the sun and elegant string beans layered with anchovy fillets on top of the mélange of lettuce.

My best intentions were never realized. I could never translate the artful into the actual. Not as a cook, a decorator, a craftsperson or a sculptor. I had worked at stone and wood for years, in art school and after, to chip away and find the object I could see so clearly in my mind. But my fingers could never bring the vision forth.

There was one thing I was good at. Listening. Listening very hard to words and nuances and pauses and silences, and understanding and taking what I’d understood and helping someone to understand it for themselves.

When the phone rang at eight, I jumped. The whole day had been so quiet. I picked it up, hoping it was Dulcie. When
she was at Mitch’s I tried not to call her more than once every day. It was hard but I usually held out, knowing that she was safe and sound with her father.

“Hello?”

“Dr. Snow?” A man’s voice.

A little breeze of disappointment that it wasn’t Dulcie blew over me.

“Yes?”

“It’s Noah Jordain. I’m sorry to bother you at home.”

“So then why
are
you bothering me at home?” It came out more harshly than I meant, but it was how I felt.

“We have another murder on our hands. A third woman.”

“Oh. No. That’s awf—Do you know who she is?”
Is it Cleo?
was what I’d wanted to ask, but I was still under my self-imposed gag rule.

“She’s not your patient, if that’s what you want to know.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“I think we should talk, though.”

“Now?”

“I’m not asking you to come down to the station house. I can come to you.”

I ran my fingers through my hair. I hadn’t even taken a shower that morning. “It’s Sunday night. Can’t it wait till tomorrow?”

He didn’t seem to care at all that I was both annoyed and indignant. “The thing is, I don’t want to wait until tomorrow. I’m up against time. This one came faster than the last. I’m afraid we may soon have another one. I know that you assisted our department before, and my partner says your insight into profiling sexual deviants was stellar.”

“But you have your own forensic psychologist, Detective.”

“This girl was twenty years old, Dr. Snow. Her scalp was shaved like a nun’s. She was wearing a hair shirt. Do you
know what that is? An instrument of torture that religious zealots used to martyr themselves. But she didn’t want to be a martyr. That was the role our perp assigned to her. He tortured her.” A pause. “In more ways than one. And most of it we think while she was still alive. Her back was flayed open. Slivers of skin hung like ribbons.”

He had obviously paused for effect. And it had worked. Shivers pinpricked my skin, up and down my legs and arms. I shut my eyes against the vision, but of course that didn’t make it go away.

I
t was going to take the detective twenty minutes to get to my apartment, he said, and I spent one-third of that time figuring out where to hide Cleo’s manuscript pages. It was unlikely that he was bringing a court order to search my house for the book. It was unlikely he even knew that the manuscript existed. But now that I had read it all and studied it so carefully, I knew how explosive it was.

I wanted it put away. Safe.

I wanted it hidden.

The pages had taken on an unearthly glow. They hummed. They emitted an odor. A dog trained in searching for explosives would run right to them.

There was a doll’s cradle on the floor of a storage closet. An old toy of Dulcie’s that she hadn’t looked at in years and wouldn’t ever look at again. It was made of rough-hewn wood, about two feet long, standing about eighteen inches high, filled with a doll resting on a mattress made of flannel.
I lifted the doll and the mattress and placed the manuscript on the bottom wooden panel, then put the two-inch-thick bedding back in place.

In the remaining time I exchanged my T-shirt for a fresh one, brushed my hair, washed my face and then put on some lipstick, mascara and blush. I looked at myself in the mirror. The makeup had helped, but I couldn’t erase the worry from my eyes or the fear from my expression. My nerves were showing. I added some concealer under my eyes to try to hide the circles. I wasn’t primping for him; I’d do this even if one of Dulcie’s friends came over. Just to be presentable. Just to be cleaned up.

And then I waited. Getting more and more nervous as each second passed. I went into the living room to make sure I’d put everything away and stopped to look at the photograph of my mother on the étagère. It was a shot of her with me, when I was just two years old. My head against her shoulder, her fingers playing with my hair.

She was still so lovely in that photo. Before the pills and the booze started to wreck her looks. It didn’t really surprise me that I was thinking of her again. Most of the time she was a distant memory that blew across me once or twice a month. But since Cleo had gone missing, since Dulcie had been accepted into drama school, my mother was more on my mind.

She is lying on the couch, and I am trying to pull her back from the limbo of the pills’ effects. Nothing else has worked, and so I decide to act out a story for her. One of the many extended stories I will make up about
The Lost Girls.

The Lost Girls
was a television show about two orphaned teenagers who were taken in by a married couple—both professors—at an Ivy League school in Boston.

The girls always got into terrible trouble, and then one of them—either my mother or her co-star, Debi Carey—would solve the insurmountable problem and save the day. Mean-while
the charming but clueless elderly couple never guessed how close the girls had come to danger and sometimes death.

The Lost Girls
ran from the time my mother was sixteen to nineteen, thirty episodes in all. And then it had been dropped. My mother did a few movies after that but was never the success she’d been on TV.

The year I was six, the series was in reruns. And night after night at 7:00 p.m., I sat rapt in front of the TV, not moving, entranced as I watched my very own mother be someone I did not know.